


The Hermit Crabs- A Mandalorian Story

by Philotes_1



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Action, F/M, Female Stormtrooper love interest, Main character is sus, Slow Burn, This is either a romcom or a tragedy, This will go places, Work In Progress, set during season 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:14:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28887432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philotes_1/pseuds/Philotes_1
Summary: The Mandalorian does something to leave one particular storm trooper very pissed off and after his exceptionally reflective head so to speak. Will she get her revenge or will they fall in love? Is she even competent enough to find him in the first place?
Relationships: Din Djarin/Original Female Character(s), Stormtrooper Character(s)/Stormtrooper Character(s)
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

Can’t see for shit. Muffled. Swaddled in duraplast. Everything is cut away around you except for the red blocks of objects that the display picks out, that and the tinned up voices of your guys, blaring in your ears.  
It’s not my favorite part of this life but it’s good in a way, it keeps your focus where it should be. The empire moderates what senses come in and what expressions come out. What came out of me was a fixed shiny black gaze framed in white, just like all the others.  
“Each and every one of you is a hero to the empire.”  
The captain walked along our tight line. There wasn’t much space along the width of the ship. My elbows gently tapped against my fellow storm trooper’s next to me as the hull shuddered. The captain’s black gloved hand fell on my shoulder.  
“Each and every one of you. Remember that now.”  
Back in the barracks a different hand landed on my shoulder, and with a voice pulled into an imitating tone its owner proclaimed:  
“Each and every one of you are heroes.”  
I swallowed my laugh, turning it into a scoff, and brushed Canst’s hand off of me. He grabbed me by the armor plate and pulled me closer.  
“My precious little heroes! My saviors of the empire! Each of you gets a freshly baked Nanstillian Biscuit for every rebel ally scum you kill. I’m just so proud of you all!”  
“That sounds pretty good actually.” I murmured “You said fresh baked?”  
“You know the Captain’s got a killer recipe.” he snapped back, dropping the fake choked up voice.  
“Well dang, I was on the fence about eliminating rebel scum before but I guess I have to now.”  
“Hey!” another trooper pushed past the two of us and gestured towards the hallway.  
“Team 72-1B is back”  
Canst, who had stopped to hook his thumbs under the edge of his helmet, ready to pull it off after a long day, let it drop back down. My heart fluttered in a way it definitely shouldn’t have.  
Shame on you! You’re a stormtrooper! A female storm trooper but that’s never what came first. Still daring, still war-like, loyal and selfless, still armored up to androgyny in your snow colored chitosan. And still. Canst. His face. His face. His face! When the helmet came off it got me every time. It was him that got me. Every time.  
We rushed out to greet our returning comrades who had already been debriefed.  
“How many went out on 72-1B?”  
“Fifteen.”  
I slid my way through the cluster of shell encased bodies.  
“And how many came back?” I called out.  
The trooper next to me turned his head. “Fifteen.”  
A cheer lit up from the crowd. I reached out my hand to pat the shoulder of one of the returning troopers passing by, coated in a streaky layer of dust. “In and out. The locals put up little resistance.” he said smoothly.  
The gaggle of the Imperial's elite fighting force conglomerated in the corridor to barracks, thumping each other on the back and glancing down the hallway to look out for any threat that may reprimand the impromptu celebration.  
AZ-912 strode past me to the room of bunks, her gait heavy and armor scuffed. I knew AZ. She was the only other female in our division and she was.. Well-  
“Go well?” I asked.  
“Mind your own business.”  
I followed her. I was wrong. Her armor was more than scuffed, I noted the thick layer of dirt and sooty black marks, the warping of the duraplast.  
“Did you get hit?”  
She grunted in response.  
“Alright.” I said, and sat down on my cot and fiddled with the control on my wrist.  
She pulled her gloves off and with her bare pink fingers began working at the wreck of her helmet. The armor made a tiny cracking noise, like a piece of ice makes when you drop it in water, but nothing happened. She wrenched upwards, yanking at her own head. I could hear her shaky breath picked up by her mic.  
“Is it stuck?” I asked.  
“I think so.”  
“Okay don’t panic. This happened to Danion on Toline.”  
“I’m not fucking panicking.”  
I stood up and yanked my own gloves off. “Here.”  
I wrapped my fingers under the grubby edge of her helmet.  
“It’s melted together.”  
“Great.” she growled. “My visual system’s down as well.”  
“You’ll just have to get a whole new one then. Maybe we could use a knife or something to pry the pieces apart.”  
She pointed diagonally across the room. “KV-187 keeps one in his bed because he’s a weirdo.”  
I walked over to KV-187’s bed and groped around the mattress until I found a flat steel blade wedged in the back corner against the wall. I flipped it over in my hand. With my visor it was hard to tell what color it was, maybe blue or purple, with some sort of reptile carved into the handle. This was definitely contraband, and if any of the supervisors found out he had this he would be in for a serious ass kicking.  
I went back to AZ and stuck the edge of the blade into the crack that had been congealed over with melted duraplast. With a pop and a bit of torque the helmet broke free from the neck piece and AZ tore it off with a gasp. Her face was sticky looking and flushed, spirals of coarse brown hair clung matted to her forehead.  
She didn’t thank me, just began pulling off the other segments of her armor, briefly looking them over then setting them in the rack beneath her bunk. I flung the knife back onto the bed of its owner, its edge covered with a layer of black gunk which I didn’t bother to wipe off.  
All armor had to be returned to the armory before we slept. She’d have to file a notice and get her replacement. Maybe not the bottom half, but the head and chest piece were cracked beyond repair.  
“What happened?”  
“Flamethrower, speeder bike, the rest is unimportant.”  
I could see a fresh shiny patch of burnt skin stretching along the back of her neck.  
“Alright then. Good luck.”  
She pulled her boots off and set them down before silently walking off to the showers.  
Fifteen out. Fifteen back. Good work AZ.  
I looked down at her gloves, at the dark splatters coating the fingers.  
Good work trooper.


	2. The Pause

“I’m here to relieve you of duty.” I announced, strolling up to the trooper standing guard outside the admiral’s chambers.  
I’d known as I’d approached that it was Canst. I was pretty good at telling troopers apart when we were in armor even if there were many clustered together in height and build. I didn’t need a number, an insignia, a face, even a voice, it was how he stood, it was the small roll back on the heel before lurching forward into a step and-  
“FS-117” he said in surprise, shoulders jerking back.  
“You’re five minutes early. I’m due one more patrol of the perimeter.”  
“Of course.” I fell into a stride to match his, we rounded the corner and started down the long hallway, weapons held diagonal against our chest. Without stopping he reached into his helmet and there was a small click, then his voice came through, quieter and unfiltered by the microphone.  
“We’re changing course you know. Heading to the galaxy’s Deep Core.”  
I quickly jammed my hand inside my own helmet, flipping off the mic as well.  
“Doesn't matter Canst. I go where the empire needs me and I always find myself exactly where I need to be. Funny how that works.”  
He laughed a little. “You’re braver than me.”  
“You don’t need to be brave. Just be loyal.”  
He glanced over his shoulder but there was nothing awake at this time save our own reflections gliding behind us.  
“Listen. I’m not like you..” he started “I wasn't born into this.”  
“Neither was I.”  
“I wasn’t a child.”  
“Neither was I.”  
He snuck a sideways look at me. I couldn't see his eyes, only the rotation of his head. That was something else about Canst. He had transferred to our division only about six weeks ago. His movements were not yet fully attuned with the armor. That was something that took longer. He would turn his face, stop, then turn it slightly more to get at what he was trying to see, clearly not accustomed yet to the lack of a full peripheral field of view.  
“You’re full of surprises 117.” He told me.  
I acknowledged with a slight nod of my own head.  
“Canst where were you when the empire found you?”  
He sighed. “Sandstrome, the S stands for shithole. Two days away from getting killed by the local mob because I couldn't pay off the fuel they lent me. Yeh, I get your point. Loyalty to the empire, and I’d never question their judgement it’s just that in the Deep Core-”  
“Do you know where I was?”  
“No.”  
“Horthren.”  
“I’ve never heard of Horthren.”  
“Have you heard of Alderon? Or Mandalore?”  
He hesitated. “Yeh. Destroyed planets. But I haven’t heard of Horthren. Was it also destroyed?”  
I smiled. “No. That’s why no one knows of my home planet. There was a massive war waged among my people and we were nearly obliterated. We were on the verge of destroying ourselves. But the empire came. They put a stop to the madness and chaos. They brought our planet to order. To question the empire would be to question the prevention of the destruction of my own home.”  
He was quiet for a moment.  
“Well you’ll go far in the empire with that attitude.”  
I didn’t reply. We had one final turn before we’d be back at the guard station. I reached out without looking and let my hand fall onto the material around his neck. I brought my fingertips against the inside of his helmet, his hair, his ear.  
“Not that attitude though.”  
He quickly grabbed me by the forearm and pushed me out of the middle of the corridor and into the wall. Then one arm loosely gripping the blaster he let dangle by his side, he yanked up his helmet with his free hand. I exhaled. He pressed tight against me, definitely tighter than necessary to ensure we were out of sight of the camera’s eye. I pressed my palm to his bare cheek. His soft eyes glistened from under the helmet's shadow.  
“What are you doing? Not here.” he whispered. I pulled my hand away and he let the helmet drop back down then removed his knee from between my legs and resholdered his blaster and kept walking. I straightened up and followed, stopping at my post. I secretly flushed.  
He stopped at the edge of the door and I took up a sentry position. Canst nodded and continued past me and with a faint crackle emerging from under his helmet I heard-  
“Later.”  
Later.  
I really shouldn’t have been doing this. Or, well, more specifically, him. And yet something told me that although my relationship with him may have been prohibited, it was also for something good.  
You see, we had become acquainted when he arrived at our unit with around seven others, all new recruits. If the new transfers had seen some battle before we typically accepted them into our ranks with little more than a nod, the newbies though, well, if they’d never been roughed up before by a rebel blaster we felt obliged to do that ourselves.  
In an attempt to escape the prescribed beating, Canst had spent about ten straight minutes waxing poetic about how he was the best roboticist on the far side of the asteroid belt and how he knew how to reprogram cleaner droids into deadly attack machines and his presence on this ship wasn't to be taken lightly. Then he promptly went to demonstrate this by ‘hacking’ the ship’s com system but instead ended up cracking the airlock and nearly jettisoned himself into space, earning himself a thorough enough berating and punishment from our commander that the rest of us decided not to give him any grief. He fell in line after that.  
He was a performer. And surprisingly, despite being no genius he was definitely not the worst stormtrooper.  
Perhaps what drew me to the newbie was he still seemed to know how to act like a real person, something I felt I had forgotten. He gave me some of that back. I wanted to help him. I could sense that he was doing his job, like a lot of the others, out of fear instead of loyalty. That was fine for patrolling hallways, or even for defending a position in a fight, but it was always those ones that cracked first when some wretched foe sought to actually test the empire’s resolve.  
If I could get through to him. If I could just bring him to the path that I was on, I was certain that was for the good of the both of us.

...

After a rather long and boring shift I was ready to lie face down in my cot and disappear into a haze of sleep or asphyxiation whichever came first. I have been told on multiple occasions I sleep like a corpse. Face straight down, arms and legs sprawled out, and completely silent.  
“Actually it’s one of your most charming attributes.” Said the trooper whose bunk was across from mine once.  
As I pulled off my helmet I tried glancing into the other room where Canst’s cot was but it was too far and I couldn’t get a good enough angle to have any shot at seeing him. He’d probably be asleep anyway.  
There was a small black plastic table at the end of the room where two troopers, both also with their helmets off sat around eating. One of the men spotted me and gestured for me to come over.  
“No. I’m too tired.”  
“Nah. You’re going to want to hear this 117.”  
YT and AY. We had no use for each other’s names so that’s what I knew them as. I was 117. There were around nine troopers in our division including myself with the prefix FS so I got called by the number instead.  
“Why?”  
AY kicked out a chair and I reluctantly sat down.  
“They’re redirecting us meet up with a Class 546 light cruiser that has been doing circles around the third quadrant for the past two months. You know who’s on that cruiser?”  
I crossed my arms. “No.”  
AY leaned forward, still chewing whatever he had been eating.  
“Moff Gideon.”  
“Huh.”  
That was a name I knew. Just not a name I knew very well. Every time someone said it their voice would change in tone. Maybe reverence. Maybe fear. If they weren't wearing a helmet it was usually accompanied by a tight lipped expression.  
“We’ve been in the outskirts 117. We’ve been cleaning the empire’s windows but we’re about to get invited inside the house.” said AY in a serious tone.  
YT looked at AY then looked at me. “What is that supposed to even mean? Inside the house. Do you know what that means?”  
AY shot him an annoyed look.  
“Whatever Moff Gideon is doing he’s calling in more backup than he would already have with him on a whole damn light cruiser.”  
“He’s calling in us.”  
“Exactly. Moff Gideon isn’t like the others. Those missions on Kenerag? Those were on his orders. All of our missions for the last two months in fact have been coming from this guy. Not the old command. He’s the rising power in the empire.”  
“All the better for us.” I said with a shrug. “We’ll get to make ourselves useful.”  
“Yeh.” said AY then paused for a moment and with a twitch of his head-  
“You think we’re more useful working on whatever insane project of his I’ve been hearing about as opposed to keeping order in the outer communities? You know the last moon we were stationed on fell immediately after we pulled out so we could go on his errand.”  
I stood up suddenly, slamming my hands on the table and lunging forward.  
“What the hell is wrong with you!?”  
AY looked up at me. Hands still and eyes narrowed.  
“Ask your boyfriend. He knows.”  
Oh shit what had Canst been saying.  
“Okay. Okay.” said YT holding up his hands between us. “Not in front of my breakfast. Please.”  
“Nevermind.” Said AY. “You never care what the orders are.”  
“It shouldn't matter what the orders are.” I hissed.  
YT tapped AY on the shoulder. “Just let her go to sleep.”  
I quickly turned my back to them and walked off to the section where my cot was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	3. The Tragedy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time for a stormtrooper to do what stormtroopers do! I put off writing this bit because I needed to scrub back through the episode for the sake of accuracy, but here it is.

“Ready?”  
I spun around. My arms were bare. My feet were bare. I was on Horthrun. Young. Stringy. Angry. Ready.  
My brother crouched before me, pulling loose the metal rod that held the cannon in the locked position. The weapon was so heavy I could barely keep my fingers wrapped around it.   
“It’s not like shooting birds okay? They’re going to scream if you hit them.” he told me.  
“When I hit them.” I corrected.  
He stood up. “This isn’t something that feels good. This isn’t something glorious. Listen to me! War is-”  
“I can hear them coming, we don’t have time for this.”  
“Alright. Don’t say I never warned you.”  
I spun around.

“Ready?”

I powered up the combat sight on my helmet. The input. The glare. The flashed of smooth imperial metal. Stormtroopers filed around me. There was the click of armor tapping against blaster metal.  
“Onto transport A!”   
It wasn’t long after docking on the light cruiser that we were immediately being weaponed up and shoved onto transports. We were given a fresh set of cannons as if the cannons we had been using to protect villages on the outer rim weren't good enough.   
I grabbed packages of charges off of the floor and tossed them to YT, who was as he called himself: “The designated explosion guy.”  
There was a lot of movement. A lot of shouting.   
“Two targets have already landed on Tython. Onto the transport now!” shouted the ranking officer.  
I turned to follow YT onto the transport along with over a dozen other troopers.   
Then there was a light tap on my shoulder, I didn’t turn back around to face him.  
“I’m on transport B.” said Canst. “Good luck.”  
I nodded. It seemed like a strange thing to say. No one had ever told me ‘good luck’ before an operation like this, like it was some sort of pod race.   
My adrenaline began to peak from the moment we stepped into the boxy ship, whose doors immediately furled closed the second the last trooper’s foot was through the door. The whole thing jerked backwards, disconnecting from the light cruiser.  
There resonated a voice somewhere indistinct from a crackling microphone. “We’re to take the child on top of the mountain. Do not harm the child. I repeat. Do not harm the child. Eliminate all resistance.”  
The ship shook as we rapidly descended through the atmosphere of Tython. The inside was dark save for the red glow of the light above which leapt off of and curled around each of our helmets.  
Ready? Ready. The entire ship along with every bone in my body shook as we hastily hit the ground. There was little time to think. A white light expanded above our heads. Smoke then sunlight. The first time in a long time I was seeing light from a genuine star. The door lowered down.  
I was not ready for what was to come.

As soon as the storm troopers ahead of me rushed out we began taking fire. Someone folded over at the end of the ramp and I leapt over him onto the grass.   
Red laser blasts skittered across the rocky landscape.  
“Move out! Move out!” shouted the ranking officer, gesturing up to the hill in front of us where the fire was coming from.   
I ducked my head behind the nearest bolder. That was the only way to avoid the deadly blasts. Whenever they hit a trooper that one would drop. It never missed.  
It was chaos, I ducked out and sprinted toward the incline of the hill ahead, squeezing off a couple of shots that glanced harmlessly off of rocks. I caught a glimpse of a darkly dressed feminine figure up on the hill and concentrated my fire in her direction. It glanced harmlessly off of the rocks. To my right I heard our commander shouting to flank as a red laser blast collided with the trooper standing directly beside him, who twisted around once then collapsed onto the ground.   
I ducked my head and sprinted. I couldn't tell if the static sound I was hearing was coming from my earpiece or if it was a production of my own brain. I felt like I was a coil of wires just snapping about, carried by the tension of its own momentum.   
I heaved myself up onto one of the boulders only to see another trooper who had done the same get hammered in the chest with a laser beam and topple off. Gritting my teeth, I slid off and kept working my way up the mountain.   
Take the child. Eliminate Resistance.Take the child. Eliminate Resistance.  
A hot beam of light whizzed past my head, grazing my helmet. I couldn't tell if it was from the enemy or from friendly fire. Maybe the second wasn't so likely. Our numbers had dropped. Fast.   
That was until- Boom! The cannon went off, colliding with the boulders on the top of the hill where those sniper bolts had been coming from. A fresh wave of stormtroopers came charging from the direction of my rear.  
I couldn't help but cackle as a beam of heavy barrage arced over my head and pebbled the top of the mountain. I could see the sniper up top maneuvering. I moved farther right, no longer fixated on making it to the top, to see if I could get a better angle for a laser blast of my own. I rounded the side of the mountain.  
I could hear YT launch another explosive charge followed by the sound of lasers hitting rubble. Several loud booms and screams. I couldn't see what was happening but it didn’t sound good.   
Up ahead of me I spotted a group of white dots, they had been quicker to get to the enemy's flank than I had and they promptly paid for it when the female appeared, still somehow alive after the arsenal that the team had been firing at her, and laid each one out with a single shot. She was out of my line of sight before I could squeeze the trigger.   
I turned. The second transport must have landed! More stormtroopers came sprinting forward and I gestured to the direction that I had last seen her.   
“Single hostile! Behind those rocks!” I shouted.  
“Affirmative.” someone replied as over a dozen troopers came charging forward.   
Try front-rolling your way out of this. I thought, pointing my blaster and joining the charge. She hit a few of us but there were too many. I looked down at her from the gradient of the hill, as a voice I suddenly recognized as AY demanded the child.   
This was it, the wall of shiny uniform white that had stood so dutifully at attention a mere hour ago, convalescing to its full potential on the battle field.   
I could tell we had her pinned, she pivoted back and forth, gun tip unsure where to focus. Her eyes darted across us, alight with intensity.  
The next moment seemed to stretch and bend before me.   
I remember an armored figure appearing behind her.  
I think I remember an outstretched arm, hand curled into a fist.  
What I definitely remember though, is something exploding in my face.  
I didn’t feel like I had passed out, I felt like I had taken just an unusually long blink, but considering I woke up laying stiff on my side with a ringing in my ears and a terrible ache in my jaw, like I had been uppercutted, this probably wasn't the case. I rolled over and pushed myself up. Everything spun around me, I fell back onto my knees suddenly nauseous.   
Where were they? Where was the sniper? Where was that- what was that- I knew what that was- in the armor. No.   
The others.   
I stumbled over the prone body of another stormtrooper. I felt uncomfortable conscious of the fluid that was oozing its way around the inside of my head as I breathed heavily into my mask.   
A flash down the hill caught my eye and I forced myself to turn.  
They were retreating!   
We were retreating that was. Not the enemy.  
I felt like someone had hit my heart with a hammer. That rolling run! Through the fog of the head pain I saw someone who moved unmistakably like Canst, who unmistakably was Canst leap into the ship as the door shut up and the carrier took off. He was alright!   
He was alright. I hoped he didn’t mourn me for too long, I hoped he realized I had died for a reason, a good reason. And that true faith in the empire, unquestioning faith in the empire, was what gave me the purpose to make amends with the inevitable blaster fire that was about to be turned in my direction once that damn sniper had seen I still had enough breath left in me to stumble around in a vertical position.  
Psteeewww!  
“What was that?” I asked aloud.  
At the bottom of the hill I made out the metal form of the someone in thick armor. Mandalorian armor! That's what is was.  
This recognition hit just as it launched the rocket that spiraled up into the air in an arc. It slammed into the first carrier, which lurched, gushing smoke, and collided with the second. I felt the blood drain out of my head as the two imperial transport ships sunk from the sky in a ball of flames. My lips felt numb.  
A glint. The creature who had fired the rocket turned and I saw the outline of his helmet. The same outline I had stared into before the explosion went off.  
Then the darkness expanded. It expanded into a single crisp shape that singularly and unforgettably exploded across the inside of my skull. The T of a Mandalorian visor. Then everything seemed to fall into me, and I fell into the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is mostly written so I'll be posting that relatively soon.


	4. The Field

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As promised.

I could hear wind gently folding over blades of grass, around boulders, and I, not so gently, folded myself into an upright position.   
A feeling hit me, like the feeling when you sprint up a set of steps without looking and the top one isn't there. A feeling that something had gone horribly wrong. No- not horribly, unnaturally, unnaturally wrong. My breath was fogging up the front of my helmet. It had never done that before. There were no sounds from the com in my ear. Only silence. Everything hurt- but most noticeably my head.  
My surroundings were dark and strangely tinted. I pulled off my helmet to try to rectify this. My hair unfurled from the bun I had pinned it in and fell onto my back all at once. My cheeks felt suddenly cooler and the air suddenly fresher but the world still possessed that jewel-stone tint to it.   
It was sunrise. Or perhaps it was the head injury. No- no it was sunrise. The beams of tawney light struck a motionless shiny lump in front of me. I reached out to feel my own legs, yep they were there, and they were also reflecting light in the same way that lump was. I gingerly got onto my feet and staggered over.   
With no movement, no life, my little trick to telling my fully suited comrades apart vanished. They all looked the same now. Like a scattered mess of dolls that a child had left behind after a particularly vigorous game of play-pretend.   
I pulled off the helmet of the stormtrooper laying prone, bathed in the light of a rising alien sun.  
“Hey AZ.”  
My voice sounded quieter than I had ever heard it before, my surroundings absorbing it up.   
The blaster had left a grey ashy smudge on her chest. That had been all it took.  
“Lucky shot. I know you AZ. You would have had them on the ropes. If only they knew..”  
I looked up. Like quartz crystals sprouting from a rock there lay each doll shelled in shiny white. I suddenly fell backwards. I closed my eyes and there it was. A white glowing T shape seared into the darkness of my eyelids. Then I could open my eyes and look down at the white armor on my forearm and see it in reverse. Black on white, the shape of a mandalorian’s visor.   
Recoiling from this ghostly image I yanked off the white canvas that it manifested itself on. Finally each armor plate hit the ground, and I stood up, dressed in black, hair loose, looking like some kind of- some kind of-  
Wait where was Casnt?  
Well I suppose he died.  
I grew very still. My mind filtered through bright flash after bright flash that had marked the day before. Unnatural. Unnatural was the word for it because Canst should not have died and yet I held no uncertainty that he did. This wasn't right.   
I was prepared to die alongside my friends. But all of them except me? No, this wasn't how things should be. Stormtroopers were never alone. We weren't solitary creatures. This was impossible.   
And yet the sun was still rising.  
The intense orange softened into the genterler light of morning and I wondered back and forth, as if on patrol, along the winding edges of the valley. The hill that had the child upon it. Once I had set my eyes upon it-  
“We’re to take the child on top of the mountain. Do not harm the child. I repeat. Do not harm the child. Eliminate all resistance.”  
-my feet carried me to the top with little effort. I had to admit, without the chunkiness of the armor I felt a bit like I was gliding. So much so that I stopped halfway up to smack myself on the cheek to make sure I wasn't a ghost.   
Yep. Wasn't a ghost. Good.  
There were some strange stones on the mountain, I briskly inspected them, kicked the pedestal in the middle and nearly cracked my foot in two. There were no electronic components. No bodies up here. Just some boring rocks. What I did gain was a better vantage point.   
There lay some prominent sooty scars on the landscape below. Charred metal and ash. Transport A. Transport B. And something else. It couldn't have been the remnants of one of our ships.  
Investigate? Investigate.  
God I was hungry. I stumbled as I picked my way down the hill, slamming my knee into a particularly unfriendly cragle of rock. As soon as I reached the bottom I stomped achicly over to the fallen form of a stormtrooper and snached his weapon up from where it lay beside him. Then I paused, reached out to remove his helmet, then immediately stopped myself and returned to my original purpose.   
I fired a series of shots at the rocks that had banged up my knee in revenge then continued on to the direction where I knew the unidentified charred heap would lay.  
I couldn't recognize the front end from the back, much less the make of the ship. I wandered through the wreckage for about fifteen minutes, back and forth and back and forth. I found the melted handle of what could have been a blaster, as well as an empty frame gushing freezing cold steam.   
Μost of what I was looking at was just shrapnel and ash.

My hunger had only increased accompanied by a headache that could best be described as a metal wedge being forced into my skull. I sat myself down then leaned back against a chunk of debris. 

And then I was-  
I was sitting at the kitchen table. I was home. On Horthren. Kicking my legs back and forth, drumming my fingers on the wood. I could raise my head and look right out the window, the small rooms sole lightsource. The sky was a still silvery grey. There was the sound of machinery, it echoed from somewhere in the distance but to me it was what the lapping of ocean waves sound like to someone who lives on the beach. Nothing to take particular notice of, it was a part of this place as much as the walls where. I sighed. Bored. Then suddenly something caught my eye.  
“Hey! What’s that?” I exclaimed, reaching out across the table to grab it.  
My mother’s voice responded from behind me.  
“Don’t touch that!”  
I froze, my fingers inches away.  
“Why not?”  
My mother set a pot down on the countertop on the other side of the room and reached inside with a scrub brush.   
“It will hurt you.”  
“Oh.” I said, recoiling my hand. “Who does it belong to? Heeny?”  
My mother sighed. “No. You’re brother’s got his own. That one’s yours.”  
I looked at it. Or at least I tried to. I couldn't make sense of what it was. I couldn’t make horrible horrible unnatural sense-  
I averted my eyes, shuddering.  
“This is really mine?”  
“Yep.”  
“I think I’ll just bury it.” I said quickly.  
My mother turned around and raised an eyebrow.  
“Bury it?”  
“Yeh. I’ll just dig a hole. Put it in. Fill it back up with dirt. That wouldn't be a problem would it?”  
“Well what will you do after?” my mother asked.  
I froze looking at my feet. Then I crossed and uncrossed my toes. I looked up at her.  
“Would you like help with the dishes?”  
“Sure.”

I sat up gasping, the T flashing across my vision once more.  
“What the-?” exclaimed a reedy voice, at first I couldn't make out the face as its owner had its head positioned square in the middle of the T. I didn’t need to see that anyway, I raised my blaster and pointed at where it would be.  
The alien yelped and toppled backwards as I meanwhile stood up.   
“S-Sorry I thought you were dead.” he gulped  
Gradually his speckilly image faded into my view. A stout frog faced fellow with turquoise skin wearing a faded yellow jumpsuit.  
“Why are you here?” I demanded.  
He raised his hands into a combination of a gesture of surrender and a shrug. “I’m just here to clean up. You know?”  
“No.”  
“Okay. I’m a scrapper. I’m not a part of- whatever went on here.”  
I looked over his shoulder, where a droid shaped like a big metal laundry bin nervously rolled back and forth, making small squeaks. The electronics as well as salvaged stormtrooper guns and armor clanked back and forth.  
With a glance around I could see that he had already picked through much of the debris of the ship as well as the belongings of the fallen troopers.  
Out of sheer habit my fingers flew up and connected with my bare temple, with a com that wasn't there. I slowly lowered my hand, I could see in his face that I had given myself away with that single gesture.   
He looked even more wary if that was possible given I was already pointing a blaster at him.   
“I don’t mean any offense by this.” He told me, with a nod to the rattling container droid.   
I dropped the blaster to my side.   
“Of course not. This is the way things go.”   
He paused, then seemed to relax slightly. His droid bumbled up to him and he gave in a pat.   
“You were a stormtrooper?” he asked me.  
I straightened up. “Was? No. I still am.”  
“I’ve never spoken to a stormtrooper like this before- you know, not in armor and well, um, alive.”  
I nodded.  
“If you want a lift I can drop you off at the nearest base, there being some kind of reward or something like that?” he asked hopefully.  
I looked up at the sky, at the rock tower, then back at the squat little alien in front of me. I walked up to his droid and picked up a helmet and looked into it’s dark visor, my own battered pointy faced reflection wrapped around the dark glass. My fingers curling under the edge of the white helmet I spun around.  
“I’m about to kill a mandalorian. I’ll take a lift to the closest place where I can do that.”


	5. The Rideshare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying okay

“Beep boop.”  
“Nope.”  
“Beeeep boop.”  
“No.”  
The scrapper looked back at me from the pilot’s seat with a pained expression.   
“If you acknowledge him nicely he’ll stop.”  
I raised my hand and gave the droid a single pat. He whirled once then quickly retreated. His top bin disconnected leaving behind a flat low body that looked a bit like a rover or a dolley.   
The ship was round and long, like a metal caterpillar with wings. Most of the free space was taken up with bins and boxes full of salvaged equipment.   
“Care to explain why so much of this stuff is imperial?” I asked, gesturing at a stack of white armor plates bundled up into a pile.  
“I’ve got nothing to hide there.” He told me. “I hear word of an imperial fleet moving through, I follow, sometimes I get lucky and they leave gifts behind. I usually end up selling it back to them.”  
I looked up and out the window of the cockpit. Pinpoints of light zipped by.   
“No harm in that I suppose.”  
“Well I’d like to think not.” he said with a small laugh. Then he cleared his throat. “So um- this mandalorian..”  
“The one I’m going to kill?”  
“Yes the one you’re gonna kill. How exactly do you know this guy?”  
“I can’t tell you the details of my mission. He is an enemy of the empire. My battalion failed in our objective. I must right that error, it is my duty to the empire to do so.”  
Your objective wasn't to kill him, it was to secure the child. This thought passed through my brain but didn’t seem to take any hold on me at all. Just kill him. Just kill him.   
Like how he killed Canst.   
I could picture him perfectly, all grey and polished shiny, hurling an explosive at my head. There had been several people on that mountain, at least three, but it was the mandalorian I remembered clearly flashing before my eyes before I was sent flying through the air, and that sunlight hitting that same T shaped face after launching that rocket into the transports.  
The ship shuddered as it began to decelerate. I could see the curve of a grey and brown horizon now moving beneath us. Then from the foggy depths of the small moon below two small zippy looking ships arose, they seemed to lift up until they were level with us before suddenly dipping, disappearing under the bulk of the iron caterpillar.  
“Oh shoot, we should probably go.” said the scrapper quickly.  
“What was that?” I asked.  
There was a clang and the hull suddenly lurched. My whole body tensed up and I heard the sound of metal grinding then a hiss of air pressure equalizing.  
“Why would you allow them to dock!?” I shouted.  
He spun around. “They have the authority to do so.”  
“I thought this was your ship!”  
“Well it’s about fifteen percent my ship.”  
I snatched up a blaster from a nearby crate but the squat little alien waved his hands frantically, “No! No! Don’t point that at them!”  
Confused and exasperated, I turned to him, “Alright, What’s going on here?”  
A female voice echoed through the fuselage.   
“I could ask the same question.”  
I looked down the barrel ship. A woman clad in scuffed brown armor stood with a blaster resting lightly at her side.  
“Marsah, you’ve returned to Viscow.” by pilot said with a nervous chuckle. “I didn’t know you were in this region. I didn’t think you were due for another few months.”  
“I see you’ve acquired a lot of loot. We’d be happy to see that it is collected.”  
Another figure stepped out from behind a stack of crates, a hulking figure with straps of metal criss crossing his massive torso.   
My pilot stood up. “Yes-erm, I marked with red the items I’ve set aside for the collectorate.”  
“Uh huh.” said the woman, as the man began rummaging indiscriminately through the cargo.   
Her eyes fell onto me and narrowed.   
“Who are you?”  
The pilot turned and gave me a nervous look. “Well, that’s-”  
“FS-117. Division red Storm trooper of The Galactic Empire.”  
She burst out laughing. I stood back erect, my jaw spasming as the pain from the explosion radiated into my teeth.   
The large man turned and looked at the giggling woman curiously. She turned to him, pointed at me, then said something in an alien language. His eyes boggled then he too doubled over with laughter.  
“Alright Galactic Trooper we’ll-”   
Then my hearing went out. I could see her mouth moving, the corners curled up into a smug smile. Her arm was outstretched, tipped with a blaster and a blue flash, a blue flash which was now expanding across my chest.  
Not again.

I awoke on my back, staring straight up at a dingy brown ceiling.   
I turned my head, through the grate of a glowing blue laser field I could see the woman outside, her feet propped up on a table, biting at her nail then inspecting its shape.  
I opened my mouth to speak but my voice emerged so weakly from the back of my throat it came out as a low murmur.   
She looked up and cracked a smile.  
“Oh?” she exclaimed with a sarcastic tone, “What was that?  
I swallowed hard and spoke again.   
“I didn’t hear the quip you said as you were shooting me. You should have said it, then shot me.”  
“Am I really getting timing notes from the stormtrooper I have imprisoned in my holding dungeon?”  
“Well I didn’t hear what you said.”  
“It was- Oh never mind.”  
I sat up slowly, the ground was awfully filthy and I was now coated in a film of dirt I wasn't sure I recognized the origin of.  
I could hear a static burbeling noise. The woman was holding a small short distance com up near the side of her head. When the transmission finished she swung her legs down and picked her weapon up and holstered it.   
“Don’t go anywhere.” She said with a vague gesture in my direction.  
“Why are you keeping me here?” I shouted after her in frustration as she retreated down the dim hallway.  
She flippantly ignored me.   
After peering around my surroundings for a few moments, I scooted over to the edge of the cell. The glowing lattice of the bars provided the sole source of illumination for most of the room.   
I stood up, an idea striking me.   
I inched my fingers carefully through the edge of the grate until my hand made contact with the control panel on the outside.   
These people really were scrappers. The frame they were using for the cell’s security system had clearly been retrofitted from somewhere else. It was pretty outdated, plus it seemed to be built to contain something a lot larger than I was. I felt out the keypad then began running through the combinations I had stored in the back of my brain from my days of guard duty. After a string of error noise after error noise there was a flash and the bars disappeared.  
I carefully stuck out my foot and stepped out. I was still in my dirt smeared boots, all of my body armor pieces being stipped off leaving me clad in just a black onesie. I snuck down the hallway that the woman had left through, my surroundings were bare; it seemed to be a bunker or celler hastily carved out of the ground.  
There was a crook in the hallway before a metal door which I had to manually activate to get it to open. It too seemed to have been lifted out of somewhere else and plopped down here.  
Light poured down from the top of a set of stairs which I set upon climbing. At the top- I was in a tent, or at least I think it was a tent. The walls and ceiling were composed of thick brown plastic sheets supported by black poles. The tent was well furnished, there were rugs on the floor and mismatched tables and dressers. I shut the hatch to the door I had just crawled out of and began rummaging. The dresser was full of junk, just scraps from various dismantled droids. I peeked around the corner and moved on to the next room.  
A rucksack laid out on a mat rested on the floor. I could hear voices chattering outside the tent and the sound of many footsteps. It sounded like I was near a market or something of the sort but I focused on my immediate surroundings for the moment. I noticed a discrete lump in the rucksack. Whoever this belonged to, perhaps it was that women, had something in common with imperial soldiers- hiding the crap they didn’t want others to find in their bed.   
It was a communications device. A bit of clicking through it caught me up to speed on my current predicament. They were planning to hand me over to the rebels in exchange for credits.   
That tracks. Filthy Scum. Probably to interrogate me, although my purchase just for the satisfaction of killing me wasn’t out of the question either as far as I was concerned.  
The shelves in this room yielded goods that were more immediately useful to me than the last. I found spare clothing around my size. Well the shirt fit fine, it was long sleeve and a plain sandy tan color. All of the pants were too short for me and ended halfway up my calf but I was never that picky when it came to my appearance, much to my mother’s dismay at times growing up. The shin guards that I had kept strapped on the lower half of my armor came off when I stripped out of my onesie but I could find no other pair of shoes to wear, so I kept my scuffed white duraplast ones. They were beginning to feel big and strange not accompanied by the rest of my suit but it still felt a little good to be holding on to this physical piece of my self chosen identity. I tied my hair back.  
Good. Ready to kill.   
Well not quite. I was as hungry as a wraith. I balled up my filthy clothing and stuck it on the shelf, then went exploring the next room.  
I raided the pantry of food supplies. The first thing I made eye contact with was a packet of bread which I promptly ripped open, balled up the food in my hand, then tried desperately to swallow it. I ate as fast as I could, the way I always had, before anyone could take it from you.   
I sat back, the bread was dense and tough to chew. I found a jug of water and dumped some into my mouth. That aided things a bit.   
I laughed a little bit to myself almost spitting out the hunk of bread. I reminded myself of a trash compactor and this suddenly seemed funny to me. I probably hadn’t really eaten in at least two days, maybe longer, and perhaps I had grown a bit delirious.   
I decided to look around the kitchen some more as I ate. I found a bag that I dumped the contents out of into the trash and then stuffed full of food. I went back to the sleeping quarters and retrieved the communication device and stuck it in the bag as well. I took a bite from the packet again. I was starting to feel downright perkey.  
The one thing I couldn't find in the tent was a weapon. I pulled out bin after bin of scrapped parts that had been stashed away but no blasters, no stunners, no implements of war. The closest I found was a long mettle ladling spoon stashed underneath the oven  
“Hey! Those are my pants!”  
I spun around, bread still sticking out of my mouth.  
The spoon would have to do then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was not supposed to be a 2000 word chapter but that's how it ended up. Idk. If anyone reading this has suggestions or feedback lmk. I'm thinking about making chapters a bit shorter bc that's my personal preference plus I might update more often if I do that. I really admire the writing stamina of other ppl on this site but that's not me lol.
> 
> Also maybe the first person is weird? I'll get around to switching the whole thing to third person eventually.
> 
> Finally, I know this is supposed to be a Mandalorian story, I mean I put it in the title and all, but fair disclosure it will be a few more chapters before he becomes a physically present character in this. I just feel like I gotta work up to it y'know?   
> And if you are reading this- thank you, thank you! <3


	6. The Bash

So yes, I did steal her stuff, but I found her indignation on the matter pretty hypocritical considering she was someone who stole other people’s stuff for a living. She had also just kidnapped me and tried to sell me to my sworn enemy.   
I ducked down behind the table as the woman drew her blaster and subsequently created a new window in the tent wall behind me.   
I spun around, still on the floor, and kicked the table with both feet, using all of my might. It was able to cover the distance, slamming into her and providing the cover I needed to leap up onto her and knock the blaster from her hand with my ladle.  
She lunged after the weapon and I brought the big spoon down with a “clonk” on the top of her head.   
Unsurprisingly, this did not seem to calm her down, nor benefit our relationship all too much.  
She grabbed my forearm and swung her fist into my side. That caught me by surprise and in the time I took to reel back she had reached behind her back and pulled out an extendable baton. She pointed at me, touched the top of her head with her other hand, then smiled.  
“Come on then, let’s see if you creatures can really fight better than you aim.”  
I took the slice of bread out of my mouth and tossed it to the side.  
“Alright.”  
I leapt back as the baton swung past my face. The next swing I parried with my own weapon. She was quick and light and darting. I wasn't used to moving like that and I immediately met the repercussions of this when her stick slammed into my stomach.  
With the next strike I grabbed her and pulled her closer into me and stomped down hard on her foot. She squirmed and I threw her to the ground ready to bring my big spoon down on her skull like a mallet.   
Next thing I knew her leg shot out and all the air left my lungs as I landed flat on my back.  
She tried to pounce on me but I kicked her away as I struggled to recover. I glimpsed her barred teeth as she went at me again- really wanting those pants back I suppose.  
I suddenly wished I had kept my armor on as her baton came whirling at my face and I raised my arm to stop it. The pain radiated from my wrist down to my elbow. Then the next strike hit me square on the side of the head, probably exactly where she intended. I didn’t black out but I felt as if my brain had been squished out through one ear and cotton shoved into the other. Everything went onto a tilt.  
Finally, I lunged at her, getting in close was the only way to avoid getting hit. Using her ear as a handhold, I slammed her head into the ground. She yelled and I slammed it again. Dizzily, I lent back until my fingers hit something metal on the floor, all the while feeling like I was inside a ship doing spins. A couple more blows across the head and she seemed unlikely to get up to try to attack me again.  
I stumbled considerably trying to get to my feet. I looked down at my hand and was somewhat dumbfounded and delighted to see the cold metal I was holding belonged to a blaster. I hooked it onto my waste and staggered back and forth a little bit until I ended up kicking the bag I had prepared. I picked it up.  
I could feel my heartbeat in my head pulsing like an old fan. I walked forward, toward the door of the tent. A muffled chatter emanated from outside.   
I pushed the flap of canvas open. I had a task before me. And I felt hopeful.


End file.
